Well in Italy it has just really happened - to the tune of $15 million.

Maria Assunta died at age 94 with no heirs and left her entire fortune to Tomassino, a stray cat she had adopted.

It sounds like the Italian economy needs the money more than the damn cat.

Writing about the farce of congress calling French fries and tomato sauce on frozen pizza “a vegetable” in school meals, Krisitin Wartman notes large food companies such as conAgra and Schwan spent $5.6m lobbying. And, lo and behold, congress killed the proposed Department of Agriculture guidelines to increase the amount of (badly needed) fruit and vegetables in school lunches.

congressional vegetables

As usual, congress didn’t have the balls to do the right thing (is there anyone in either house who will do the right thing, not jus what ever will bring them the most money/best chance or re-election/power?)

The argument, conservatives are reported as making, is that it is not the job of the “Nanny State” to tell people what to eat.

There are so many flaws to this argument - in that we legislate what’s good for people in so many other places.

But the point Wartman makes is it’s not the government that controls our kid’s desire to eat the “sugary, salty and fatty products” that are causing them to become fat, diabetic, hypertensive and atherosclerotic.

“Corporations do” she says, through relentless advertising and their monopoly on schools cafeterias.

Divine

Any way, lo and behold, she has a famous pair of knockers now.

junior gets an overdose

I’m prompted to write this now because Consumer Reports tested 31 popular grocery brand juices and found a lot of arsenic and lead in quite a lot of them.

Arsenic causes cancer amongst other things. Lead poisons nervous systems - especially ones that are developing, so has a particular effect on kids (who are the main consumers of juice of course).

And the Sugar

But let us not also overlook the sugar issue. There seems to be this idea that because juice comes from something “natural” that it must be OK.

Well, sugar comes from sugar beet or sugar cane, both of which are “natural” - or that “high fructose corn syrup” (which is to be sanitized by renaming it.)

And for comparison 8 oz of Coke contains 26g of sugar. 8 oz of orange juice contains 24 - not a very significant difference.

Other reports from the Internet are that a 16 oz bottle of apple juice has 56g sugar - so 8 oz has 28g - more than the Coke. Twelve ounces of grape soda has 159 calories. Same quantity of grape juice has 228 calories.

CBS News reports that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no juice before age 6 months. And then just 4-6 oz per day up to age six - but how many parents are filling their kids sippy cups with all kinds of juice?

The $10 billion juice industry isn’t happy with the restrictive advice - surprise surprise. CBS reported “Carol Freysinger, executive director of the Juice Products Association  . . .is critical of doctors, telling parents to eliminate juice, saying it gives a bad name to a healthy beverage and could prevent people from getting important nutrients juice offers”.

Despite the guidelines, 60 percent of 1-year-olds drink juice, averaging 11½ ounces a day, according to 2002 USDA data. That’s up from 57 percent less than a decade before reports CBS.

If you want to get a good feel for how much sugar is in these drinks, take a look at Marshall Brain’s Science of the Brain video on U-Tube urging you to add the equivalent amount of sugar (7 ½ teaspoonfuls) to an 8 oz glass of water.

Incidently, note Dr House in his former incarnation

Now anyone who knows what’s good will eat kippers for their own sake - and not those nasty leathery “Kipper Fillets” you get in a tin from Wegmans or wherever. The succulent, moist real thing from the fishmonger in Essex Road just down from Cross Street - oh but damn, I’m forgetting, you have to go to London for that.

But the idea is that fish is good for your cognition (not just heavy drinking as in my post Alcohol for Your Heart Brain and Pecker).

Cyrus Raji from University of Pittsburgh Medical Center reported to Web.MD that 70 year olds eating one fish serving a week had bigger brains and more grey matter, and of particular interest had a reduced rate of Alzheimer’s and dementia, after 10 yrs, than their non-fishy counterparts.

They have really sold the idea that red wine is only booze that’s good for the heart.

Norman Kaplan of Framingham Heart Study fame always said it’s the alcohol not the red wine specifically. Now a study reported from Italy would seem to support that.

It showed a different alcoholic drink, beer, has the same benefit as red wine, and can lower the risk of cardiovascular disease by 31%.

Actually there have been other studies showing the benefits of different types of beer - and it’s noted malt has a lot of those healthy vitamins - especially B6 and B12, and antioxidant flavanoids.

Also in a study, reported by John Folts of the University of Wisconsin to the American Heart Association it was noted dark beer can have particular benefits - Guinness has substantially more anti-clotting activity than Heineken.

No wonder the Irish are so healthy - and maybe their procreativity is not the result of their Catholicism, if we are to believe another report in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that moderate drinking protects against impotence in the long term (it’s all to do with keeping the blood flowing to the relevant parts I guess).

But “moderate” is the operative word. We all know about “brewers droop” and how you can’t get a good stiffy when you’ve had a serious skinful.

And, get this, it can even make you cognite better.

A study reported in the American Journal of Epidemiol;ogy showed people who drank did better than people who didn’t in a series of test to assess intellectual ability.

Other studies, also reported in the AJE noted that alcohol consumption may have a beneficial cognitive function in women, but not necessarily in men - I’m sure that’s just because men were trying to hit on the women after a few drinks, and the women maintained their cool and disdain (and probably the study was done by a woman).

In another however, it showed women who drank moderately (2-4 drinks a day) showed superior performance to abstainers. But that men also had some benefit - but they had to drink 4-8 drinks a day.

What amazes me is the quantity. Here am I telling my patients a healthy amount is an average of one drink a day/seven drinks a week for women. And two drinks a day/fourteen drinks a week for a man.

That’s a little different from the up to 30 drinks a week that were correlated with improved intellectual ability in the first study. Or the second, with up to 8 drinks a day correlating with “superior performance in many cognitive domains”

I’d have expected someone drinking 56 drinks a week to be a driveling idiot. But let’s drink to that.

This is a quote, not from some raging leftist, but from current leader of the pack of republican potential nominees, Newt Gingrich (from when he was minority House whip in 1993).

This was after Clinton introduced his attempt at universal health care in the 1990’s.

A decade after which Mitt Romney resurrected the idea in Massachusetts which required the residents to buy health insurance or face up to $1,212 in annual penalties.

“It’s the Republican way of reforming the market” he is quoted as saying when this became law in 2006 - and referring to the “free rider” issue of people not taking out insurance until the get sick if they are not mandated, he said “to have people show up when they get sick, and expect someone else to pay, that’s the Democratic approach.”

And now, in case you haven’t notices, the Republicans are doing everything in their power to get the courts to declare the idea of everyone being mandated to take out health insurance, be declared unconstitutional.

He notes households headed by old farts over sixty five have 47 times the net worth of households headed by people under 35.

But - they live so long, and health care is becoming so expensive, there is a danger of them eating up all that net worth, and their kids never getting their hands on the family loot.

I don’t know how old Petri is, but, though I go along with his concern, being over 65 myself, I’m not sure I go along with his solution.

“Sure they may be wrinkly and taste sort of gamy, with a hint of talcum powder” he says, but his solution is to eat the elderly - “the alternative is to continue to allow them to devour us”.

He asked me to go lecture these Probation Officers, and the odd Correctional Officer, for two sessions of three hours each on the subject of Co-opting Physicians in the Re-entry and Supervision Process. Didn’t tell me what I was meant to tell them, just “oh, talk to them about interacting with doctors”

How do you talk for three hours on something you really know nothing about? Talk about “the blind leading the blind.”

And “Co-opting Physicians” has an uncomfortably obligatory ring to it - but these guys are used to mandating what people have to do.

So I put together a Power Point of goofy pictures to try to keep the audience entertained while I stumbled along, mainly making the point that if the patient has not chosen to tell, their doctor may no nothing of their nefarious activities and interaction with the Department of Corrections - like the most ultimately curmudgeonly patient I had (who looked like the Unabomber) who was diabetic, hypertensive, alcoholic, depressed, anxious, smoker, who had heart disease and hepatitis C and was on chronic oxycodone for back pains , who I only found out was a regular smoker of marijuana and had used IV drugs (hence the Hep’ C) when I had to do a deposition on him (he is suing Pfizer because his nervousness reputedly got worse when I prescribed him Chantix - though this struck me as a bit of an optimistic fishing expedition, and somewhat insignificant compared with the abuse he had subjected his body to).

She only knowes what the patient tells her

Luckily my audience had a bunch of questions and it turned into more of a “shooting the breeze” session for three hours.

They had some great stories to tell. The guy who was making moonshine out of mash in a trash bag who dumped it all in the loo when he heard they were doing a “sweep”. But couldn’t bear to let it go, and was shitfaced and dripping from drinking what he could out of the commode - which apparently looked like a punch bowel, sort of pink, with all the mash floating around - before he had to flush it.

And there’s a fascinating “museum” in the entrance hall of “shivs” - murderous looking home made knives - ropes made from paper, a garrote made from strands of electric cord and even a gun one of the inmates somehow managed to make.

Now if only all this ingenuity could be put to good use. . . . . .

Maybe if you move in those circles all the time you get a bit cynical, but the P.O.’s seem to have an unbending conviction about the con’s, that “if their lips are moving they’re lying”.

There is a woman friend of Mrs. Gagg’s son who was being monitored by the Drug Court, and came up with positive for marijuana, though she swore up and down she was clean - but still finished up in jail.

“Is it possible a drug screen can be wrong?” I asked, in my naive way.

“No way” was the uncompromising answer - and the chemistry of the urine drug screens is pretty good these days (ibuprofen used to give a false positive - but that’s been fixed, except for possibly very high doses of several “non-steroidal-anti-inflammatories”). But that doesn’t effect the possible collecting and processing snafus. And this friend claimed the collection process was very lax.

And Mike tells me P.O.’s think doctors “can be suckered in to doing anything” - referring to the ability of patients to get their doctor to prescribe whatever pain med’s take their fancy. And this was definitely the hottest button issue they wanted to talk about.

It is a bit of a mind-field, this algology (the field of treating pain). There’s no test you can do to measure the pain level. You are reliant on the patient’s subjective assessment - and many of these patients are the most manipulative. Like the ex-cheerleader with pelvic pain syndrome (many of them have these rather vague diagnoses, and you really wonder are you treating an illness or feeding the habit) who, my nurse pointed out, always dressed very seductively whenever she came for her prescription of oxycodone (and I, like a dog in heat, pandering to her every wish).

Then I had this insight, that here was I, spending hours of my time, bullshitting about something I know virtually nothing about. The P.O.’s were right about it being possible to sucker doctors - Mike had done a good job.

This uses the body’s own immune system, or  “your own immune cells that have been trained to seek and attack prostate cancer cells” to quote the website. It is the product of work such as that done by Ralph Steinman (see post A Laureate’s Successful Failure) and the brave new world of cancer vaccines.

Should be wildly successful and making the manufacturer (Dendreon) rich wouldn’t you think?

But Dendreon stock has been more lead balloon like than my retirement portfolio in the last month. It has dropped by 67.4%.

Poor promotion, out of control overhead have been charges leveled. But one of the big issues is, even though Medicare has recently opted to cover Provenge, it costs $93,000 for a course of treatment.

It is a prime example of what we can’t afford.

I guess if I was the one with the prostate cancer, this may be an expensive straw I would want to grasp at. But society as a whole - a society that is going bankrupt, in large part because of the cost of medical care, which in turn is costing so much because all these clever researchers are coming up with ever more fancy, expensive treatments - cannot afford it. Or not unless they are willing to pay an ever larger proportion of GDP toward healthcare (The prediction of the Congressional Budget Office is that just federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid and other medical stuff is going to escalate from 5.5% to 12% of GDP by 2050).

Someone, somehow has to put a lid on it.

It’s called “rationing”  - or “death squads” if you want to be emotive.

And when there’s a treatment available that has the potential to save someone’s life, it’s very hard to tell them “no, sorry”.

I wonder what would happen if you told all the researchers their main goal was not innovation, but cheap treatments?